Is there any body there?

[Thomas]

On another board, @DerekhHikmah asked: "And the diamond body, the text mentions it in the beginning, what do you take that to be exactly?"

That conversation has yet to fully to unpack itself, but I thought I'd throw in some stuff here. In utilising a search engine, I found a lot of stuff thrown up which is derivative if not fanciful – a lot of opinion, but rarely based on direct reference. So I though I'd stick to search-engine generic answers, and hope that someone more critically informed might add in.

The Diamond Body
In Buddhism, the vajrakaya symbolizes an indestructible, enlightened form that transcends physical limitations and duality. It represents the pure, luminous nature of reality and the practitioner's potential to realize an immortal, subtle body through advanced meditative and tantric practices. Known as the Diamond Vehicle in Vajrayana Buddhism, the culmination of practice, achieved through vajrasattva yoga and tantric visualization. It is described as a celestial body beyond dualities, formed by purifying the physical and subtle bodies until they become transparent and luminous like crystal.

In a broader Mahayana contexts, the diamond body signifies a Buddha's indestructible state, free from corporeal needs, such as food, etc. It is closely linked to the Diamond Sutra Vajracchedika, which uses the diamond metaphor to describe wisdom that cuts through delusion and conceptual attachments.

Rainbow Body
In Tibetan: jalü or 'ja' lus, is the spiritual attainment in the Tibetan Dzogchen (Great Perfection) Tradition, wherein the physical body dissolves into pure light at the time of death. This signifies liberation from samsara.

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Equivalences can be drawn between the two, and from a number of other traditions:

St. Paul spoke of the spiritual body (soma pneumatikon) in 1 Corinthians 15:40.

Sufism speaks of "the most sacred body" (wujud al-aqdas) and "supracelestial body " (jism asli haqiqi).

In Vedanta, "the superconductive body."

Building on concepts by Iamblichus and Plotinus, the late Neoplatonist Proclus (5th century CE), credited as the first to speak of subtle or astral (starry) planes, posited two subtle bodies, vehicles, or 'carriers' (okhema), between spirit and the physical body. These were the augoeides okhêma, 'luminous vehicle' / 'body of light', the immortal vehicle of the rational soul, and the pneumatikon okhêma, 'pneumatic vehicle' / 'body of breath' (the indwelling vital breath pneuma) which he identified as the mortal vehicle of the irrational soul.

In some Gnostic schools, the Body of Light or Body of the Resurrection is the spiritual form attained by awakening the divine spark within and transcending the material world. This concept is central to those gnostic systems which view the physical body as a prison created by the Demiurge, while the true self is a spark of the supreme, transcendent God. Not all humans are in possession of such a spark.

In the Emerald Tablet "the Golden Body" is "the Glory of the Whole Universe". The alchemist Paracelsus called it "the astral body".

In the Hermetic Corpus, it is called "the Immortal Body" (soma athanaton).

In some mystery schools, "the Solar Body", and in Rosicrucianism, "the diamond body of the temple of God".

And so on ...

 

[wil]

I think there are psychedelic plants and fungi on every continent.

 

[Thomas]

On the topic of rainbows: a DBH digression:

"(T)he 'Rainbow Body': the jalü, is a Dzogchen Buddhist concept with its roots in the indigenous Bon religion of Tibet, before the arrival of the dharma. The phenomenon describes the transformation of the physical body into a saṃbhogakāya, a body of pure light, beginning near to and then following upon death. It is an extraordinary mark of supreme enlightenment, supposedly witnessed on a number of occasions, and its principal signs are reported to be the rapid shrinking away and even complete, or nearly complete, dissolution of the body at death, attended by such phenomena as rainbows in the sky, and in some cases followed by appearances of the departed teacher to disciples and friends."

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In Rainbow Body and Resurrection, Fr. Francis Tiso treats at length the case of Khenpo Achö, a Dzogchen monk and teacher who died in 1998. In his last days witnesses say his face took on a youthful appearance, a fragrance of holiness filled the room, music was heard in the air around his little house, at twilight strange rays of sunlight shone brilliantly from the east for a long time, and five rainbows appeared over the house for many days on end. Eventually, he disappeared into his body of light, his 'od sku. During the days of his funeral rites, his fleshly body – his nirmāṇakāya – grew smaller and finer until at last, in less than a week, it simply vanished into a vajra body, leaving no physical remainder.

I am no more adverse to the idea of the Rainbow Body than I am to the Resurrection. I am of the opinion that the resurrection of Jesus is not something outside of nature, somehow alien to it and therefore a complete and, for us, meaningless enigma. Rather, I am of the opinion that such phenomena offers an insight into the nature of reality, a constitution of the cosmos that is more than merely material, and infinitely more real than a dream.

 

[Thomas]

On rainbow and resurrection, a digression of my own:

The only thing we can absolutely affirm about the resurrection accounts in the New Testament is that they're all different.

Treat the texts as a puzzle to be put together as a whole cloth, you end up with a patchwork quilt, or a ragbag of contradictions. The best one can hope to do is trace back to the critical minimum: He was crucified, He died, He was entombed, He rose again. Of that much we can be certain. Of the details, there are different accounts.

How do we reconcile the differences? Well one way is to assume the whole lot is fictitious and dismiss it. Or we can say the four are all mythologising. Or ... ad infinitum.

Or, we can refer to the Rainbow Analogy. No two people see the same rainbow. In the 'experience' of the Resurrection, no two accounts are quite the same, because no two responses to the event and its meaning are the same. In each, the response is subjective.

It's not the event, it's the Evangelists' response to the event that is there on the page.

Scripture is not attempting a forensic reconstruction. Why would it? That's the least of it. Christ is not in Scripture to be read about, He's there to be encountered. We can discuss the technicalities of the optics of the rainbow as much as we like, but all that counts for not a jot compared to the child-like wonder at the witness of a 'magical' event which, if embraced and engaged and entered into, opens the doors to perception beyond the surface of manifesting phenomena.

Put another way, reading Scripture should be a Quantum, not a Newtonian, process. An entanglement in which the reader becomes one with the word. To seek the clinical detail – the 'actual historical record' – is a finger-and-the-moon thing.

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Hart again:
"In one sense, every phenomenon that is not purely private, such as a dream, has something of the character of a rainbow: its perceptible qualities are provided by the mind that interprets the data of the senses, and but for that mind there would be no phenomenon as such. The world that manifests itself in consciousness exists wholly by virtue of the indissoluble union of mind and being.

"(T)he necessary nuptial relation between the 'objective' disclosure of what is and the 'subjective' intentionality of consciousness is so primordial that even the division between object and subject is a relative one, as the ultimate truth of all phenomena is a dynamic act of poetic creativity. Unlike dreams, rainbows are a shared experience, but what is shared is in some sense still a dream, even though that dream is the world itself."

 

[Thomas]

One for @otherbrother –

Of the Inklings C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and others, perhaps the most influential was Owen Barfield, as the more famous two both cite him as a significant and considerable influence in their philosophy and their mythopoeic writings. Barfield's The Silver Trumpet, likewise served as an impetus and inspiration behind The Hobbit and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

Barfield, however, was primarily a philosopher, perhaps most famous for Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry.

Here, Barfield presents the relationship between human consciousness and the world – in which reality is not simply 'out there', objectively independent of us, nor is it merely a subjective illusion. Reality is the interaction between the external world and human consciousness.

One of Barfield’s most original ideas is that human consciousness has evolved historically. He distinguishes three stages:
Original participation: Early humans experienced themselves as deeply united with nature. People experienced the world as something living and meaningful. They saw themselves as in and of the world.

Withdrawal from participation: Scientific thinking gradually separated the observer from nature. This inevitably led to the objectification of nature, leading to the Enlightenment view of nature as a 'wanton woman' needing to be tamed and managed. Similarly, this same objectification gave rise to its counter, the Romance movement, with its idea of the Sublime, an aesthetic blending of beauty and terror in the awe-inspiring 'otherness' of nature.

Here the objects of consciousness as other-than become idols.

Final participation: Barfield's hope is a progress from withdrawal to a more holistic consciousness – not a reversal/retreat to the 'original' state, but a future stage in which people consciously recognise their participation in reality while retaining a modern self-awareness and rationality, combining scientific knowledge and spiritual meaning – not our current dichotomies of the one or t'other – but a unity of 'how' (science) and 'why' (religion), the latter a reawakening of meaning and value beyond the pragmatic and utilitarian.

It is not so much an re-engagement with the world as a re-enchantment of it.

Barfield's philosophy challenged two common positions, a naive realism which assumes the world is as it is, independent of an observer, and a subjective idealism which assumes the the world is simply constructed in the mind.

He proposed a middle path in which reality is co-created through the interaction of a real external world and human consciousness. In this sense he was in accord with the ideas of quantum physics, in which the world is seen beyond ever-more microscopic particles, more as probabilities, engagements, entanglements, etc.

Sadly Barfield (d.1997) was unaware of the digital world as it is emerging, as an inversion of the transcendent principles of the Real, the True and the Beautiful, in its current manifestation of LLM and social media egregores, as humanity moves not towards a final participation but a final retreat into the unreal.